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Blue Valentine (Blu-ray) Blue Valentine could have been called “Scenes from a Marriage”, if Ingmar Bergman hadn’t already taken the title. But Bergman is an apt reference. Derek Cianfrance’s film is as American as they come, but it shares the Swedish master’s emotional rawness, his bleak...

The Yards (Blu-ray) This is warning, not a review. The Yards is a standard-issue tale of crime and corruption in Brooklyn that’s elevated by a first-rate cast including James Caan, Ellen Burstyn, Charlize Theron, Joaquin Phoenix, Faye Dunaway and Mark Wahlberg. Released in 1999, the film...

All Good Things (Blu-ray) All Good Things is based on the life of real estate heir Robert Durst, but most of the names have been changed, because the film sticks closely to known facts and draws the same conclusion that anyone who followed the story reached long ago: that Durst – excuse...

The King’s Speech (Blu-ray) There’s no upside in defending a Best Picture winner, and also no need. Disappointed fans of a film that didn’t win (or wasn’t even nominated) will never be convinced, and why bother trying? The campaign is done, the vote is over and the statue has already been...

Mesrine: Killer Instinct Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 (Blu-ray) Jacques Mesrine (pronounced “may-REEN”) was an outlaw and gangster whose celebrity in France ranks with that of John Dillinger, Clyde Barrow and Al Capone in America. Mesrine was every bit as colorful and legendary, but he...

Scream (Blu-ray) Scream turns fifteen this year, and it’s hard to remember that this landmark in pop culture was ever anything but a surefire success. Director Wes Craven didn’t want to make another gory film; head honcho Bob Weinstein hated the killer’s mask; both casting and script...

Mad Men: Season Four (Blu-ray) The cover art invoking Vertigo is an apt image for Mad Men’s fourth season, in which the past weighs heavily on the present and recurrences are common, but always with a difference. By this point, the series’ creative team has abandoned any effort to make...

Fair Game (Blu-ray) Fair Game is the story of Valerie Plame, the former covert CIA operative “outed” by columnist Robert Novak. The resulting scandal ultimately led to the conviction of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, for obstruction of justice and...

A Film Unfinished A Film Unfinished is unique among Holocaust documentaries, because it concerns a film that the Nazis themselves made to “document” conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942, a few months before its inhabitants were transported to the extermination camp at...

The Man from Nowhere (Blu-ray) South Korea’s highest grossing film of 2010, The Man from Nowhere is a slick and skillfully crafted crime thriller, and it confirms Korea’s status as one of the most vital sources of popular moviemaking today. It seems appropriate that an industry...

Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo Trilogy (Blu-ray) Imitating a familiar studio approach, Music Box released the second two films in the Millennium Trilogy in barebones editions containing only the movie and a trailer. Now they’ve released all three films as a box set with a “bonus”...

The Norman Conquests The British writer Alan Ayckbourn likes to challenge himself. When he sat down to write a trilogy, it wasn’t a continuous narrative. Ayckbourn’s three stories overlap. Each takes place in a different part of the same house over the same weekend involving the same...

Nurse Jackie Season 2 (Blu-ray) Edie Falco won a 2010 Emmy (her fourth) for Nurse Jackie. Since Season 2 debuted just seven months after Season 1 concluded, the award covered both, a tribute to Falco’s sure grasp of an elusive but fascinating character and to the ability of series creators...

Memento, 10th Anniversary Ed. (Blu-ray) The new Blu-ray of Christopher Nolan’s best film to date provides good news and bad news. The good news is that Memento has never looked better. The bad news is that fans need to hold onto their 2002 special edition DVD set, because plenty of...

Bad Boys (1983) (Blu-ray) Before Oz, there was Bad Boys. Tom Fontana’s HBO series may have taken prison life to Shakespearean heights (or depths) of passion and revenge, but this 1983 low-budget cult classic was one of the first attempts to find serious drama in what had generally been...

Pleasantville (Blu-ray) Pleasantville’s insertion of color images into black-and-white photography was both a technical breakthrough and an ingenious narrative device. As Robert Harris and others have already noted in the “A few words about . . .” thread, the film’s innovative use of CGI...

Enter the Void (Blu-ray) Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible traumatized a lot of viewers. Some were fascinated by this brutal tale of rape and revenge told in reverse; some called it pretentious trash; and many were simply offended. But one thing was clear: Noé went for an audience’s jugular, and he...

Let Me In (Blu-ray) Mixing vampires with a coming-of-age story isn’t a new idea, but John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, Let the Right One In, took it to creepier places than Joss Whedon or Stephanie Meyer ever imagined. The 2008 Swedish film of the same name, scripted by Lindqvist and directed...

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Blu-ray) The final entry in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy confirms the wisdom of the original plan to present the second and third films as a TV miniseries (which is how they were written and shot). On their own terms, neither film is...

Client-9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Blu-ray) Getting at the truth of a tabloid scandal isn’t easy, because everyone thinks they already know the story. By the time former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer wore out his currency as a punchline, who wanted to revisit the subject...

Stone (Blu-ray) A misfire like Stone demonstrates just how hard it is to make a good film. The script, by Junebug screenwriter Angus MacLachlan, was intriguing enough to attract a talented director (John Curran from The Painted Veil) and an A-list star, Robert De Niro, whose attachment...

Jack Goes Boating (Blu-ray) For his directorial debut, Philip Seymour Hoffman helmed a character study as intensely focused as the film that won him an Oscar for best actor. But Jack, the title character (also played by Hoffman), couldn’t be more different from Truman Capote, the ambitious...

OK, I can't wait any longer. [/url] (and adapted by yours truly) Q: What is the 2011 Film List? A: The 2011 Film List thread is mainly for discussing, reviewing and tracking 2011 films. The "Track the films you watch" thread is a great place to keep track of all films watched...

ttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704278404576037691969791946.html?mod=djemTEW_h#articleTabs%3Darticle The WSJ still charges for online access; so here are some relevant excerpts: The trend has led some to question whether the electronics industry's embrace of...

Restrepo (Blu-ray) There was an initial flurry of news coverage when military operations began in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, but that was over nine years ago. After March 2003, Iraq dominated U.S. news. More recently, domestic issues have moved to the fore. The war in Afghanistan is now...

Metropolis (Blu-ray) Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has multiple stories. There’s the literal narrative, which is very much a product of its time and can now, at long last, be followed in its entirety (or most of it). There’s the cinematic imagery, which is so original and provocative that it...

1. BEST MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA a. BLACK SWAN Protozoa Pictures & Cross Creek Pictures & Phoenix; Fox Searchlight Pictures b. THE FIGHTER Paramount Pictures and Relativity Media; Paramount Pictures and Relativity Media c. INCEPTION Warner Bros. Pictures UK LTD.; Warner Bros. Pictures d. THE...

Micmacs (Blu-ray) Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet makes whimsical fairy tales, but they’re usually just as dark as anything from the Brothers Grimm. That signature style, demonstrated in Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, got Jeunet the unenviable task of directing Alien: Resurrection...

The Expendables (Blu-ray Combo Pack) To paraphrase The Matrix’s Agent Smith: “Welcome back, Mr. Manly Man! We . . . missed . . . you.” Usually when someone revives a genre, it’s an exercise in nostalgia (see “Grindhouse”; subchapter: “Tarantino and Rodriguez”). But when Sylvester Stallone...

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child When Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988 at the age of 27, he was already a successful artist. Since then his reputation has only grown. In a somewhat fictionalized 1996 film biography, fellow artist Julian Schnabel tried to capture the ethereal...